Yang Xianhui (1946—), writer. Yang was born in Lanzhou, Gansu Province. In 1965, during high school, Yang went to work in the countryside as a sent-down youth. In 1971, he was admitted to the Department of Mathematics of Gansu Normal University as a worker-peasant-soldier student. After graduation, he worked as a middle school teacher in Gansu, and later in Hebei as a party committee secretary and a communication officer at a local salt farm. In 1988 he joined the Tianjin Writers' Association to work full-time as a writer.
His historical novels such as Chronicle of Jiabiangou and Chronicle of the Dingxi Orphanage portray life during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Famine, and are constructed from interviews with a great number of survivors and recollections of his own time as a sent-down youth. The two books have drawn comparisons to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which chronicled Soviet labor camps.
